A Regional Core, Adjacent, Periphery Model for National Economic Geography Analysis

27
[Figure 7]

The Single City Regions meet the dual criteria of: one, official classification, and, two, the
absence of agricultural employment. The Interior Non-Border / Coastal Regions are regions that do
not have a coastline or border on an EU or non-EU State. The Non-Coast Borders on Member EU
State are those regions without a coastline that border on a pre-integration foreign region. The second
group of border-regions is the Non-Coast: Borders on Non-EU Country. These regions border on the
former East European countries. The final group on the EU continent is the Regions with a Coastline.
The Island Regions are removed from the continent.

The significance of this distribution pertains primarily to the border and coastal regions listed
in columns (3), (4), and (5). The analysis indicates that each of these clusters of border and coastal
regions contain core, adjacent, and periphery regions. Because a particular region may qualify for both
categorisations, the above distribution contains some double counting. The Non-Coastal: Bordering
on a Member State group contains eighteen core, and twenty-two adjacent regions respectively. The
cluster Non-Coastal: Bordering on a Non-EU-Country contains six core regions and five adjacent-
regions.¹⁷ Finally, the group Regions with a Coastline shows twenty-eight core regions, thirty-five
adjacent regions, and fifty periphery regions. These three clusters demonstrate that a region’s
geographic location does not pre-determine its classification type.

6 Agglomerations and the EU Geographic Core

This section examines the concept of the EU geographic core (Krugman and Venables, 1990)
and answers the question; ‘How many adjoining core regions form the EU geographic core, and where
are they located?’

The EU geographic core is formed by fifty-two of the seventy-two core regions of its member
states. In addition to this, there are fourteen individual adjacent regions serving as buffers between the
major core clusters. The geographic core stretches in an arc through continental Europe creating a

¹⁷ The identification of these regions is significant for their potential economic influence on the former East European
regions when they become members of the EU.

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